In today's ever increasing mobile society portable personal communicators are becoming a standard carry item for members of society. Besides including a computing device a personal communicator may include a communication receiver, such as a radio frequency receiver, for receiving transmitted wireless messages. A personal communicator therefore may operate as a selective call receiver to receive messages and to present the messages to a user of the personal communicator such as by displaying the messages on a display.
Additionally, it is customary for many different occasions for individuals to give each other greeting cards with messages for particular occasions. Typically, an individual would go to a store and select a greeting card that is made from a paper product with an image and a message printed thereon. The individual would pay the cashier a predetermined amount of money and then take possession of the greeting card. Subsequently, the individual may hand write a personal message on the card and then give the card to a receiving party. The process described above can be inconvenient for a purchaser and sender of the card because it requires the individual to physically go to the store, manually search through many cards located on shelves, pay a cashier with money carried on ones person, physically write a personal message on the card, and then possibly send the card to a receiving party such as by air mail with all the costs and delays involved therewith.
Furthermore, customers of electronic shopping services can access the service by calling a dial up telephone line and accessing an electronic data base describing different products for sale. The consumer could browse through the data base while being on line with the electronic shopping service computer system. Once a product is selected by the consumer, such as by entering a selection into the electronic shopping service computer system, the purchase demand is logged in the central computer system for subsequent processing and delivery of the product to the consumer. The consumer would be subsequently billed for the purchase along with the delivery of the product. This type of on line shopping service is much like dialing one of the conventionally available 800 telephone lines to request purchase of a product. But, by using an electronic data base as opposed to talking to a human operator answering an 800 telephone line, it allows the consumer to browse on line through the data base and make a selection. Unfortunately, this type of service requires a caller to be connected on line with the service while browsing and making the purchase selections. This takes significant amounts of resources at a centralized computing system to handle the incoming calls, browsing over available products, and logging customer selections for subsequent delivery to the customers.
Additionally, electronic mail networks are becoming commonly available to network users with a proper hardware and software. Typically, a user of the electronic mail (E-mail) system can down load custom forms from a central E-mail distribution center and then can select and modify one of the forms with a personal message. The individual can then send out the personalized form as an electronic mail message to a receiving party on the network. Regrettably, once an individual has down loaded into their computer any type of custom forms, such as by electronic communication or by a medium such as a floppy diskette, the individual can duplicate the custom form and utilize the product as many times as desired without a mechanism for compensating the person who did the original artwork and creative work on the custom form. Hence, there is no mechanism for the sellers of the custom form to get paid for their work according to the number of copies that are utilized by a consumer.
Therefore, with the increasing popularity of personal communicators and the availability of an electronic mail networks, there is a need for allowing consumers of greeting cards to more easily shop for the greeting cards, add personal messages to the greeting cards, and deliver the greeting cards to a receiving party, while allowing the original artist to be more fairly compensated for the products that they distribute to consumers.